[photo by factoryjoe]

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

I heart Nicholson Baker to the attack… even more now that I’ve read his essay on Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books. His piece is generous, funny, fair, and– amazingly– accurate. A bit more:

This sounds chaotic, but even the Pop-Tarts page is under control most of the time. The “unhelpful” or “inappropriate”—sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metalheaded—changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It’s a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons.

This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard’s one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you’re going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): “HES A BIG STUPID HEAD.” James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball.

One part of the podcast of Alan November’s “Using Technology for Building Learning Communities” presentation caught my attention because November highlighted an aspect of wiki educational practice that I hadn’t really consciously thought about before: the use of the history mechanism to extend the educational moment.

In describing a third-grade (!) Wikipedia project, November explained how for months after the students had gone on a field trip and documented a historical landmark, the teacher was still using the history to engage students in the project, asking them each time if the change was one that belonged in the article or not and editing as needed.

Of course this kind of evaluation is something that we expect will happen in wiki projects, but for some reason I’d never really thought about the potential utility of the length of engagement. Most writing projects, even as the result of collaboration and peer editing, are pretty much done when the document has been produced. In my own use of wikis I’ve focused student efforts after the main production on preservation (or creation of new articles) rather than growth and continued use of what they have already made. It’s obvious, I guess, that with living documents, the teachable moments extend beyond the usual frame… and sometimes beyond the bounds of the particular class or course itself. But I hadn’t really thought about it before.

Sounding the death knell for social software applications (and classes of application) is a sport for some prognosticators and bread and butter for the naysayers. Most of the time they are equally wrong. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? But this major upcoming change to the Wikipedia editing system has me tempted to join in.

Technorati reveals no links to the page on Flagged Revisions, but given that Wikipedia’s success (not to mention any number of purported failings) is generally attributed to its open editing system, implementing multiple layers of bureaucratic approvals sounds like a very big deal indeed.

After multiple readings I am beginning to think that the documentation of this change is being purposefully obfuscated. The very terminology of “surveyors” who have the right to “flag” a particular revision as “sighted” (meaning: administrators who have the right to promote a page as being correct) is a bit mystifying. But the bottom line appears to be this: there will be a new class of administrators with a rather broad power to vet pages. The mechanism of this power comes in the display: the sighted (approved) version of the page will be the one that users who have not logged in will see by default. The fact that later revisions are available is touted as a major reason why this isn’t a bad change, but being available and being obvious and utilized are very different things. A closed system is a closed system regardless of whether the system is actually locked or only apparently so.

Users who are logged in (an exceedingly small minority of users to whom this change is not really directed) will see the actual, current version of the page. This makes sense: such users are typically those who are editing Wikipedia, they will understand these changes which will be opaque to more than 99% of the Wikipedia users. Far worse and more restricting is the fact that all users will, when they edit the page, will see the current version! This will not just be disconcerting when there are newer, unapproved revisions… it will reduce and dissuade contributions from the general user population which is a significant part of the group of Wikipedia editors. Registered users contribute the greatest number of edits, but I suspect that the majority of original and significant content– as opposed to stylistic, structural and essentially clerical changes– come from the huge unregistered population. It is, after all, what wikis and Wikipedia are all about! And let’s not forget that future registered users come from this vast core of anonymous editors. You know those users, they are the ones who go on to be dedicated, enthusiastic Wikipedians.

Is corporatization an inevitable attribute of long-term, sustained success and growth? More importantly, are all the familiar power structures that have been partially subverted (and re-created in different forms) bound to come back with enough time and popularity? I understand the motivation behind this change, but it seems like a poor– and potentially tragic– implementation. Is this an example of the kind of mediocrity by consensus that some of the negative voices claim? And will this new, officially licensed group do what all special groups of this type tend to do and, consciously or not, assume the role of power-seeker and empire builder?

As someone Twittered, WikiMindMap is Wiked Cool… and it will soon be available as a piece of software anyone can run on their own server. A definite point in favor of running the MediaWiki engine (along with the insanely cool Wikipedia Presentation script).

I love how applying a visualization tool can illuminate even information that we think we already know, revealing connections ignored, overlooked, or minimized.

[via Gardner Campbell]

The current Theory of Everything wiki pages/slides are available…

Posted to a Creative Commons list today, links to several interesting articles regarding Wikis and the political process in Re-public (Summaries by the original poster):

Ward Cunningham - Wiki and the rise of gift economies
Creator of wiki software, Ward Cunningham, argues that the proliferation of wikis has proved that the for-pay economy is not the only way to create value.

Pete Ashdown - Open source politics
Being the first politician to to use a wiki to develop his campaign platform for the 2006 US Senate election in Utah, Pete Ashdown makes the case for open source politics.

Paul Hartzog - Panarchy and the wiki-fication of politics
Hartzog introduces the concept of panarchy, a sociopolitical field that emerges when connective technologies enable cooperative peer-to-peer production – of knowledge, of tools, of power.

Australian bill of rights initiative: Collaborating on public policy
Wiki politics are put into practice. This article focuses on the development and the rationale behind ARBI , an online project aimed at promoting awareness and discussion of human rights through the collaborative development of a bill of rights for Australia.

Liz Lawley discusses a great project where she had her students collaboratively create their own final exam. A wiki seems like a natural place for this kind of activity… I’m going to try this method out this semester.

I expressed my skepticism about the Citizendium Wikipedia fork at TechCrunch… Clay Shirky has thoughtfully dismantled the most fundamental flaws in the conception of the project. Is there some new way around them I’m not seeing?

The Teaching Hacks wiki contains some very useful resources on a number of usual social suspects– social bookmarks, RSS, folksonomy– as well as some that are not discussed as frequently, like GeoTagging. Highly recommended (even if post-secondary educators aren’t a recognized group there) along with the Teaching Hacks blog.

Most of Jaron Lanier’s critique of Wikipedia (to use an unfair shorthand– go read the essay for yourself) is John Dvorak style trolling: build the strawman (Wikipedia without any administration or bureaucracy), light the torch with controversial, fiery rhetoric (calling Wikipedia an “online fetish site for foolish collectivism”), and set it ablaze with appeals to the elitist, self-righteous intellectual inside each of us that likes to consider ourselves above the rabble.

The reality is much less interesting than Lanier’s fantastic vision. There is, of course, a danger in creation by community. Anyone who uses the web has seen the horrific results of design by committee, and I wouldn’t harness the collective intelligence of the crowd to write an insightful volume on what poetry is (create) or make a good goulash (perform). But it seems to me that the collective intelligence is more than a match for things like creating an encyclopedic entry for goulash and poetry. These are very different activities. Recognizing that group consensus leads to positive results in only some circumstances hardly seems like an intellectual breakthrough.

Nor is Wikipedia free of administration or bureaucratic procedure as even the most half-hearted investigation reveals. In fact, if you want to be a significant contributor to the effort it takes quite a bit of time to figure out all the rules and procedures that govern the site once you get beyond simple editing.

There is one thing Lanier gets right: we are currently living in a time in which the perception of power of collective thought has swung radically to the positive. Instead of hearing about the lowest common denominator and too many cooks spoiling the broth we hear about the wisdom of crowds and the power of the community. It’s good to suggest caution in assigning the product of collective efforts as authoritative. I would suggest that the problem of authority is much larger than this particular issue and it would be wise to recognize that even the Wikipedia is essentially an infant, rather than infantile; it is an experiment that is helping to answer the very questions Jaron raises, not a collective Frankensteinian monster.